Was Kraven the Hunter really that bad? Alessandro Nivola reflects on his experience playing the Rhino in the film as the film continues to crash and burn.
A few years back, Kraven the Hunter would have gone down in history as one of the worst performing comic movies of all time, being lambasted by critics and fans alike while struggling at the box office. However, given Sony’s string of poorly received superhero projects with Morbius and Madame Web, it’s hard to imagine it’ll even be a footnote in people’s memory of the universe.
Yet not everyone understands the hate. Alessandro Nivola, who played the Rhino in Kraven the Hunter, admits that he doesn’t know what went wrong behind the scenes for the film to get as lambasted as it has been. All he knows is that he enjoyed his time on the set, and couldn’t sense any behind-the-scenes problems at the time.
“I really don’t know what happened behind the scenes,” Nivola explained in a recent chat with The Hollywood Reporter. “On these kinds of movies, you hear about all the wranglings at the studio, and maybe there were too many chefs. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know enough about what the process was beyond just my experience of being on set, which was really joyful. So I didn’t have any sense of there being problems behind the scenes. But a lot of that probably starts to play out in the edit with all the different opinions about it, so I really couldn’t tell you.”
Alessandro Nivola Breaks Down His Meme-Worthy Scream
Perhaps the only truly notable thing about Kraven the Hunter aside from its bombing was a moment where Alessandro Nivola lets out a truly mindboggling scream. Many have compared it to sounding like a dying bird, with it being one of the few memes to come out of the project. According to Nivola, the scream was originally silent, before ultimately being changed in post-production.
“The way I performed it was totally silent,” He explained later in the same interview. “It was a silent scream. When I did it, everybody laughed on set. It was so weird, but they all loved it. We kept referring to it as the ‘silent scream moment.”
“So I kept asking J.C. [Chandor] during the edit if the silent scream was still in the cut, and he said, ‘Yeah, of course. We would never lose the silent scream.’ But when I saw the movie, it had that guttural voice catch, which I don’t think was as effective as it would’ve been otherwise.”
Alessandro Nivola having a slightly funnier scream is far from the only piece of misleading information around Kraven the Hunter. Sony’s entire universe was built on false starts and hints that Spider-Man might appear in one of their projects. So while it’s a shame that Nivola will never face off against the webhead as the Rhino, it may be best for this era of films to be left in the past.
Kraven the Hunter is currently playing in theaters. Stay tuned for all the latest news regarding the Aaron Taylor-Johnson movie and be sure to subscribe to Heroic Hollywood’s YouTube channel for more content!
